IN MEMORIAM

Henry J. Bruman

Professor of Geography, Emeritus

 Los Angeles

1913—2005

With the passing of Henry John Bruman, UCLA lost a distinguished faculty member and philanthropist. Born in Berlin, Germany, he came to Los Angeles with his mother when he was eight years old. Henry Bruman’s formal education, at all levels, was in California. He graduated from Los Angeles Manual Arts High School in 1930, and attended California Institute of Technology for one year before transferring to UCLA. His first degree, in 1935, was in chemistry, but after spending a summer in Mexico he turned his attention to geography, in which subject he earned a second bachelor’s degree at UCLA. He was to combine these interests in his dissertation “Aboriginal drink areas in New Spain,” written under the supervision of Professor Carl O. Sauer at UC Berkeley, where Bruman received his Ph.D. in geography in 1940.

 

Henry Bruman’s first faculty appointment was at Pennsylvania State College (now University), interrupted by World War II when he served in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). At this time he was rewarded for his work on Latin America with an appointment at the Smithsonian Institution, and by a visiting fellowship at Harvard University. In 1945 Bruman returned to UCLA where he was to spend, with the exception of periods abroad, the rest of his academic life. He was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1947, at which time he was in professional correspondence with A.L. Kroeber at Harvard and, later, with Joseph Needham at Cambridge University.

 

Throughout his career Henry taught courses on Latin America, based on extensive field work, to generations of admiring students. He combined this with service to UCLA’s Center for Latin American Studies. He had a profound interest in the life and work of the German naturalist Humboldt, whose career and interests closely matched his own. Appropriately, Bruman received the Alexander von Humboldt Gold Medal from the Federal Republic of Germany as being “the most prominent American scholar of Humboldt,” to quote German Consul General to Los Angeles, Wilhelm Fabricius.

 

From 1957 to 1962 Henry Bruman was chair of the Department of Geography at UCLA. It was a time of great expansion in faculty, resources, and buildings. His most important administrative achievement, with the help of a succession of University Librarians, was in the founding of UCLA’s Map and Government Information Library. This facility, one of the best such units on any campus in the United States, now bears the name of Henry J. Bruman.

 

Perhaps the most rewarding personal accomplishment of Henry Bruman was his return to his native Germany as Director of the University of California Study Center at the Georg-August Universität, Göttingen, 1966-1968. He was honored by being a regular Professor there while serving as Director, not always the case. He is well remembered by students at Göttingen by having a grove of California redwood trees planted on the campus. Henry’s last important overseas appointment was a Fullbright Fellowship in Portugal.

 

After selling, very profitably, a Section (one square mile) of forested land in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, which he had acquired earlier, Henry Bruman invested in Westwood real estate. This increased rapidly in value so that he was soon a rich man. After the death of his mother; Henry (as a bachelor) had no close relatives in the United States. Accordingly, he established the Henry J. Bruman Educational Foundation to dispose of his fortune in an orderly manner. His benefactions, all to UCLA, include: The Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Cultural Geography, The Henry J. Bruman Chair in German History, and large grants to the UCLA Library. Other benefactions at UCLA are to the German Department, Chemistry Department, Fowler Museum, and Clark Library. Recalling his impoverished student days and financial aid he had received, he endowed student fellowships; and reflecting his personal taste, Bruman endowed an ongoing chamber music series at UCLA.

 

Like other scholars (famously, Isaac Newton) Henry Bruman was reluctant to publish until he was entirely satisfied with the results of his considerable research. Over the years there were a number of articles, but no book until close to the end of his life. It was through his devoted students and associates that his dissertation of sixty years earlier was published as Alcohol in Ancient Mexico by the University of Utah Press, 2000. A glowing review of this book in Choice described it “as the only work on this important subject and it is extraordinary in combining classic geographical and ethnographic perspectives in a systematic way”. Another reviewer, in the American Anthropologist, wrote, “In a way that no one else has done in any part of the world—and that no one is likely ever to do again—Bruman trekked through most of the country collecting plant specimens and recipes, combing early documentary sources, and learning how drinks are made and used by native peoples”. Geography is pre-eminently the study of interrelationships, and his book, Alcohol in Ancient Mexico, may well be Henry Bruman’s greatest legacy.

 

 

Norman J. W. Thrower